Screen Scenery: Transposing Aesthetic Principles from Real to Electronic Environments

Understanding and Representing the Social Prospects of Hybrid Urban Spaces

“…The ethnomethodological approach from sociology is interested in the activities of creating, understanding, and maintaining the order of social life, where the results of studies are descriptions rather than theories. These descriptions are used to help researchers to understand`ordinary' everyday action (Buscher and Hughes, 1999). A theoretical approach to understanding the behaviour of people in public places was taken by Goffman (1963) in his notes on the social organisation of gatherings and inquiry into the interactional involvement of people in social situations.…”

“…Sociological techniques and analytical approaches have been applied in HCI and computer-supported cooperative work research for over a decade. Researchers interested in designing for virtual communities have used the work of Whyte (Buscher and Hughes, 1999;Donath, 1996;Erickson et al, 2002). Using ethnomethodology to study people's interactions in, and with, electronic environments, Buscher and Hughes identified a`language of sociability', encapsulating interactional information to understand the interactions between people in face-to-face situations.…”

“…Certain contexts enable people to perform actions that are significant only at a particular moment in time, and so defining this dynamic context of use is difficult. To understand this context and to inform the design of interactive environments, ethnographic studies of the strategies that people use in moving around real-world space, and observations of people's interactions have been undertaken (Buscher and Hughes, 1999;Ciolfi, 2004;Tamminen et al, 2003).…”